NATO’s Red Herring

In Washington and at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, the view is that alliance members spend far too little on defense. Despite repeated cajoling from U.S. defense secretaries—and now from U.S. President Donald Trump—for European allies to spend more, many European finance ministers are opposed to opening their purses to their defense counterparts.

Only a handful of NATO allies—Britain, Estonia, Greece, Poland, and the United States—spend 2 percent or more of their GDP on defense. And that’s out of an alliance of 28 members. No doubt there’ll be more cajoling at the annual Munich Security Conference when scores of leaders and hundreds of diplomats along with defense and security officials gather in the Bavarian capital on February 17.

By spending more on equipment and training and sending 5,000 troops to Poland and the Baltic states, NATO aims to reassure its more vulnerable members and show Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, that the alliance is taking collective defense seriously. But something of fundamental importance is missing from the spending plea and the deployment of troops: institutional memory, or what collective defense and deterrence used to mean in substance and in practice.

During the Cold War, NATO was in top gear. Training and coordination, doctrine and capabilities, strategy and preparedness were taken as given. Collective defense was ingrained in the theory and practice of the alliance.

The year 1966 cannot be compared with 2017. The Warsaw Pact is defunct. In that sense, the conventional definition of the Cold War no longer applies today. But Russia is still intent on weakening or dividing NATO. The alliance’s demise remains Moscow’s goal. Russia’s determination to hold on to its immediate western neighbors—Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine—and maintain a strong influence over Armenia and Moldova has already been tested by Moscow’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.

Page 4 of NATO’s 1966 report states clearly that Soviet policy toward NATO—a policy that Putin is replicating today—was based on “economic means, political means, propaganda, subversion, and military power.” With a brief interlude in the early 1990s, the Kremlin hasn’t discarded these instruments.

This is NATO’s Achilles’ heel and the reason why the debate over the 2 percent spending goal could be a red herring. During the 1990s, the alliance lost its raison d’être—and understandably. Many of its members assumed Russia would embark on a different kind of cooperation or coexistence with the West. However, NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 and Russia’s staunch opposition to that mission only reinforced Moscow’s Cold War perception of NATO.

The alliance, meanwhile, slowly lost the tools that underpinned territorial defense: coordination and strategic thinking. In 2001, NATO went off to Afghanistan, where crisis management and counterinsurgency eroded what the alliance was established for in the first place. “The strategic pendulum is swinging back from crisis management to deterrence and collective defense,” a top NATO diplomat told Carnegie Europe on condition of anonymity.

The problem is that on the ground, NATO’s European allies are singularly ill equipped for deterrence and collective defense. Again, there is a lack of institutional memory. “We lack the generals who knew what deterrence and collective defense were about,” another NATO diplomat said.

Just as crucially, NATO today lacks the necessary infrastructure. During the Cold War, NATO had strong bridges, aircraft, roads, and a railroad network to transport troops quickly and in large numbers. True, there were tens of thousands of NATO troops at the ready. But that infrastructure also included energy supplies and logistics, the availability of housing and food, and the ability to cross borders without bureaucratic delays. All these have been largely eroded. If NATO is serious about deterrence and collective and territorial defense, it has to remake this infrastructure.

As the 1966 report stated, “to be fully effective against an attack with little or no strategic warning forces should be provided with adequate combat and logistic support, possess the necessary tactical mobility, and be deployed forward with appropriate echeloning in depth in suitable tactical locations.”

NATO cannot revive this depleted institutional memory. A whole generation of military, diplomatic, and security personnel has been replaced. That is why the 2 percent spending issue will become a red herring unless NATO realizes what it has lost and what Russia has retained.

Not a bad article, not bad indeed. It's certainly true that most of the military capabilities and non-combat measures (such as the catalogue of infrastrcuture, bridge loadbearing capabilities etc) were lost post-1990 etc and that regaining them will be a difficult undertaking. The unmentioned issue, however, is that a pre-1990 USSR was seen across Western Europe as a direct national threat (given its economic and military power, its military doctrine as well as its ideological underpinnings). Russia today does not put everyone on their toes as the old USSR did - states far removed from the "frontline" feel a lot less threatened by Moscow than those directly on the "frontline". Compared to the USSR of old Russia lacks the economic and conventional military power to be perceived like its predecessor in most states to the West of the river Oder.
Secondly there are multiple sets of "national interests" at work here. Quite often the german interest in making economic deals with Moscow is brought up, but looking at the running french Presidental Election Campaign one cannot help but notice how the three most likely President Elects have displayed conciliatory attitudes to Moscow ... either because of a perceived ideological concurrence (Le Pen) or because of coinciding national interests in other (more important) areas (Fillion and Macron). Which means a unity of effort will be difficult if not impossible to achieve, because many countries will not be willing to go beyond the "point of hurt" on matters that are not a core national interest.

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Reginald.Bowler

February 14, 20172:57 am

I'm not so concerned about the amount of spending and NATO general capability as our own andwhat we spend the money on.
Take the recent actions in Syria as an example.
We have had a small part to play, that's all, leaving apart the question of whether or not we should have had any part. The Russians sent a "small detachment" to deal with their commitment there, the size of which we could not possibly match.
Their and our defence spending is very roughly comparable. They have a far higher capability. Why?

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Roger

February 14, 20179:11 pm

Instead of "red herring " the 2% goal should be called a fig leaf. Allows countries to claim "success" if they achieve this goal regardless of whether or not they have developed the capabilities to defend themselves or improved their infrastructure to enable the alliance to help defend them.

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Jean Baptiste MUNYARUGERO

May 31, 20173:26 am

The PEACE and WAR Issues the Nowadays WORLD Faces Won't be Dealt with using or Relying on TANKS: No Way!
Peace is Ensured once People, Peoples and Nations sit together and Talk , Listen to each other: it's the Most Reasonable Way to SOLVE Conflicts Out!
Just an Opinion!

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